


misericord

by napoleonscomet



Category: The Oresteia - Aeschylus
Genre: F/F, Gen, au where clytemnestra spares cassandra, bonding over being fucked over by agamemnon, bonding over being fucked over by apollo, cassandra/clytemnestra but it's not really the main focus of the thing, cassandra/helen in flashbacks, everyone is trying to replace someone, i might as well just tag this a ghost quartet crossover, not unbecoming (wo)men who strove with gods, orestes/pylades in periphery, the women of the house of atreus have a lot of shit to work out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-06-22 04:52:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19660213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/napoleonscomet/pseuds/napoleonscomet
Summary: Knowing she won’t be answered, Cassandra begs: “Kill me.”The words come out and Cassandra understands them not by the tongue that speaks them, but by how Clytemnestra covers up the breaking of her voice by dropping into a whisper, and how the blade’s tip moves, waveringly, to the ground.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this was meant to be a quick gay oresteia romp for a friend but it went somewhere really different really quickly.
> 
>  _misericord_ : a medieval dagger used for mercy killings; from _misericorde_ : an act of clemency; from _misericordia_ : pity.
> 
> enjoy.

_one._ _misericord._

Troy is a wall. A wall and some indefinite mass contained within it, but a wall, little more. The city in microcosm makes her—a bird constrained and vainly chirping, pecking infinitesimally at the stone and earth and longing for the sky, a wall entrapping her, body and throat. Troy—famous for its walls unassailable. And yet it was within them that Cassandra turned to stone (not like Creusa under the open sky, the grass tickling her back, her knees, her face pressed into it—she looks at her namesake, sometimes, those three syllables the only commiseration she can imagine. But no—Creusa is loved).

And yet how she misses Troy like a mother’s embrace. The carriage shakes to a stop, Agamemnon jumps out, speaks to someone she does not know in a tongue she doesn’t speak; and to another man in the other tongue, and to another man.

This is the first sight of Clytemnestra: Red dress, voice high and haughty, speaking words she doesn’t understand both to the man who brought Cassandra and, as she moves closer to the carriage, to Cassandra herself. Her eyes are, she knows, wide and uncomprehending, her face slack. When the queen realizes, she stops short. The party processes inside, and Cassandra is left behind with a guard.

He is wearing a helmet, but his eyes are visible beneath it. They’re kind. A thrill of something far too akin to fear bursts through her as he opens his mouth—speaks in her language.

“You’re from Troy?” he asks. Cassandra nods, furnishes no details further.

He glances around. “Me too. From the Troad, that is; not the city.” Cassandra is, for once, glad of her torn and dirtied clothes.

“I as well:” So she lies.

And so she keeps on lying, spinning some story of a shepherd’s wife, and a raid of Achilles’ on a small village, on the prisoners’ dispersal throughout the Greek camp in an effort to raise the morale of soldiers far from home. The taking of a shepherd girl to kneel before a great king. The guard’s eyes soften and he touches her arm. She jerks away like she’s been burned—he understands, or seems to.

As their conversation unravels, she comes out of the carriage and sits on the carpeted ground, facing him. She learns his name, which she will come to forget, but the name is a lifeline in that moment.

Soon, however, the moment’s broken as more soldiers, recognizably Greek this time, stream from the palace and seize her roughly. She screams new cuts into her long-torn throat, but it comes to nothing, and she’s dragged into the palace regardless.

It’s not Agamemnon’s feet that she’s dumped in front of, crumpling like a stack of kindling; but rather, Clytemnestra. She takes Cassandra’s face in her hand, tries to speak to her. Cassandra stares mutely, unmetaphorically. The queen speaks again. Silence pervades.

Frustrated, she barks a command at the soldiers in the room, who haul Cassandra to her feet and sit her down on the king’s left side at the banquet table spread.

This is Cassandra’s first hour in Sparta: Flashes of conversations unremembered and biting down on her, incoherent and shattered.

As the hour wraps up, blood begins to fly.

…

It hits Cassandra first on her cheek—when it happens, she wonders distantly if she’s crying, until she goes to wipe the customary tear away to find her hand swatched with red. When she sees it, the color drains from her face and her body’s thrown into a trembling that she can’t stop. Distantly, she wonders if she won’t just shake apart.

After that, she’s not aware of much else. There is a scream, and there is blood in her hair, and there is blood on her dress, and then there is blood on the sword held in front of her face, nearly close enough to brush her nose, and there is blood on the hand that holds it, a hand remarkably still now beginning to match hers in its customary motion.

Knowing she won’t be answered, Cassandra begs: “Kill me.”

The words come out and Cassandra understands them not by the tongue that speaks them, but by how Clytemnestra covers up the breaking of her voice by dropping into a whisper, and how the blade’s tip moves, waveringly, to the ground.

  


_two._ _revenant._

Her life as a revenant is just as achingly unbearable as the first time it became like this. Here’s how the story goes: Cassandra is spared from something pitiable by the hand with power to do it anyway—Cassandra wishes they had just gone through with it. Cassandra keeps her body. Cassandra loses her voice. Cassandra keeps her life. Cassandra loses her mind.

And so it is. Cassandra sits alone in her room for hours—she knows there are people here who can talk to her—none of them ever come. On the third day, by her imperfect reckoning, there is a knock on the door, and the queen herself blows in.

She points to herself. “Clytemnestra.”

“Cassandra.”

“Cassandra—Troy. Clytemnestra—Mycenae.” Cassandra knows this already, but decides: There is only advantage to feigning ignorance. If Clytemnestra were to know who she was, her connection both to Paris and to Helen, it could easily bode badly. If Clytemnestra knew already, she wouldn’t be assuming (although correctly) that Cassandra doesn’t know Greek.

The queen continues, asking her a question. Cassandra shakes her head and frowns. Clytemnestra sighs. Cassandra is struck, suddenly, with the fear that she’s bluffing, and that she knows exactly who the girl before her is. _She wouldn’t have spared me—_ or perhaps that’s exactly why she spared her.

  


_three. hollow._

This is how Clytemnestra remembers her daughter, the morning before the ship set sail: Her hands in Iphigenia's rough hair, braiding it around and around and again and again in a bridal hairstyle—knowing it would be taken out and done again when they reached the end of the voyage, but desperate not to be Demeter, her daughter married behind her back and the mother gone, far away. Iphigenia's hand in hers, far too much smaller than her own, the hand of a girl. Her daughter’s pale face; the tears she had not allowed her to cry upon their parting. This is the picture in her head that she refuses to deviate from.

The two messengers arrived on the Mycenaean shore on the very same day—she saw them both inside, called them to her one by one—and had she heard them in the opposite order, she might even have believed the one that came from her husband, describing the spectacle of the wedding, the scarlets and golds flying about, the flowers and the song and their daughter’s ebullient smile.

Clytemnestra knows better than to believe it, though: It feels, unassailably, a lie. Her lover found her in the palace rose-garden, crying dust into mud and spoiling her dress. In peripheral glance, Cassandra looks very much like Iphigenia.

…

This is how C lytemnestra remembers her sister,  when they were together in Sparta:  The apple-blossom-cheeks of a girl, the gravity of a woman; a maiden’s beauty and a wife’s grace.  A mess of contradictions—so, so much simpler than Clytemnestra.

Helen went to Troy—there is no doubt. Let poets scrutinize her reasons, let poets put thoughts and decisions in her head— Clytemnestra doesn’t imagine she thought about anything at all, just let herself be carried off  on wind of a gathering storm. 

She doesn’t think of her sister often—she’s never quite sure what to think of her. There is, beneath everything else,  _envy_ . Helen failed in the end, but so will she, she knows it. In the meanwhile, however, Helen was free.

…

This is how Clytemnestra remembers her husband: Calling out another name.


	2. Chapter 2

_four. hollow ii._

Here is a city stammering out its last breaths. Here is a city whose streets have run red again and again, and here is a city that Cassandra loves. It’s built rising from the endless expanses of the plains of the Troad, walls to shelter it from the wind unbroken by a friendly tree or mountain. Here is a city that is sacred—that has told Cassandra she is unholy.

Still, she feels the plains’ wind ghost across her skin, even on the humid nights that Mycenae sees where the air stirs least of all. Cassandra has spent her entire life ensconsed in these walls. Entombed. She has known nothing else, so she can love nothing else.

Helen was good to her—they were, both of them and at the core, girls without a home; and they crashed into one another like waves on the shore, or the Scamander and Simoeis flowing together. Everything that passed between them was drenched with the salty sea-spray. Cassandra might have held her had her arms not been made of glass.

To think of her brother hurts her—Paris, that is, her twin like Artemis to Apollo. Apollo who destroyed her Artemis who saved—

not her, that is, but her. Iphigenia, her double, her namesake, the girl who looked like her and never made it to Troy. The girl cut open like Cassandra’s own sister.

She thinks of _home_ as bodies spread with blood.

  


_five. sepulcher._

“I am like you,” Electra tells her one day, the salty sea lapping up their legs from where they sit on a rock half-sunk in the shallows of the bay, their skirts pulled up to their knees. And Cassandra nods, because she is right; because this girl is a younger version of herself, herself before she was cut with a wound still unhealed, but herself already and nevertheless assimilated into the silence it’s brought.

Cassandra’s Greek isn’t good enough to reply with all of this, however, so she leaves it at a nod and nothing more.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Electra asks. Cassandra nods, because Electra is young, and because they are so much alike.

The girl takes her hand, a finger to her lips, and leads her—somewhere, she’s not sure where, isn’t yet sufficiently acquainted with this terribly unfamiliar land.

They end up rather far into a forest with some trees Cassandra recognizes and some trees she doesn’t, and there is a cottage made of inexpertly hewn rough timber, and there are windows and a door in the face of it, and it is almost like a home.

A man stands in the doorway, closer to Cassandra’s age, although still younger, probably. He waves to Electra, and she runs forward and springs into his arms, a teenage girl suddenly become a child, and she holds onto his neck, but only because he might well up and fly away.

“This is my brother,” she says, and her voice is high and proud. “Orestes.”

“Cassandra,” she introduces herself. Then, softly: “Alexandra.”

It’s the second name that means something to this man—Orestes—and his face clouds. He says nothing.

…

Sitting in the cottage, crosslegged, her knees brushing against Electra’s and the man whose hands still too often on Orestes’ body and around it; Cassandra can almost feel peace for the first time since she herself was young like Iphigenia. They drink of ill-strained honey wine, and Orestes pours it with soft and gentle hands into bowls old and on the verge of cracking.

The wine is strong, but not too strong; but it has been a long time since Cassandra has drunk, and by the time it’s run out, her head is beginning to swim. The tightness Orestes carries in his face and his shoulders begins to wring itself out, and he softens. He addresses to his sister something Cassandra doesn’t quite catch, and she replies in kind.

He turns to her. The Greek consonants sound just like rain on a tarp roof—pattering, and incomprehensible. Electra shakes her head. Cassandra tries to wrap her tongue around the phrase she’s learned by heart, “I don’t speak Greek,” a lifeline. Even that fails her and

she’s drowning drowning drowning in a vision tunnelling into black and spiraling beneath her feet her hands her hands aren’t really her own as they sit at herside like stones pulling her under her lips are heavy and hot suddenly burning like a prophecy she can’t be _heard—_

no light reaches her eyes, and her voice is not her own, dripping in the golden honey of the sun—

“ _Cassandra!”_ Electra’s cry breaks through her reverie. No; the hand wrapping around her wrist is, if not familiar then trying to be, and undeniably safe.

“S—sorry,” she stutters out in all the Greek she can remember, and the arms that encircle her are unfamiliar, but warm.

…

Later, as the wine is wearing off and Electra’s tired head is drifting onto her brother’s shoulder, and as he has reached for Pylades’ hand, they begin to talk more seriously. Cassandra knows little Greek but Pylades knows a little of her own tongue, and between the three of them, the conversation is able to progress.

“Alexandra,” Orestes begins, and it feels like apostrophe, as if he’s addressing someone not in the room with them, someone left leagues away and buried in the falling rubble of Troy’s walls, alongside her brother who loved her inexplicably, or her mother who loved her less.

Cassandra nods.

“Paris is—was—your brother.” It’s not a question. She nods again, without emotion. “He ruined my life, you know.”

“He ruined mine, too,” she admits. “But he’s my brother / but he never meant to / but I love him.”

“He has ruined so many lives,” Orestes repeats.

“How could he know what would come of it?”

“How could he not?”

“How could he have escaped what the gods wanted from him?” asks Cassandra. “When they want something from you…you can’t get rid of that. Not without destroying everything—ruining your own life. And then they take it anyway, snatch it from your dead arms. He had to run off with her—there wasn’t any other way.”

He speaks in metaphor: “Everything I’ve ever known is buried on those plains. My father’s grave is there—it is empty, and it is full.”

“Everything I’ve ever known is buried in rock and ruins,” Cassandra replies. “I saw it coming and I couldn’t _move_ , like a cart barreling towards me, ready to break, to burst apart, to spill.”

“How could you see it?” asks Orestes, and she tells him. Her secret goes from walls to rubble, and while still they surround her, the slim light of day breaks through. She leaves nothing out—Orestes’ face is solemn. “The gods take,” he replies, “whatever they want.” His hand finds hers; steadying. “Apollo.” She flinches at the name, ever slightly, his body her patron and her tomb. “Do you know: After everything, he’s set to take from me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i realized halfway thru writing this that i forgot to put aegisthus in here which is, i suppose, praxis;


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not excellent or of length equal to the other chapters but i wanted to end it here & set up Shit Going Down in the chapter forthcoming....

_six. gloss._

There are days where Cassandra wants to tell Clytemnestra, but they’re eclipsed by the days where her tongue betrays her; and she sits on the floor of the queen’s room, knees tucked up to her chin, listening to the other woman talk, in silence.

They converse in Greek: Of course they do—the language of this land; a land that did not bear Clytemnestra, but still, it’s her mother tongue. Cassandra’s skips and halts, falters, but after days, the words begin to learn to come forth. And so they talk: For hours into the night, a night that grows longer and longer as the days since Cassandra’s arrival pass. She begins to tell stories of herself, as if begging the queen to see her sitting in the pale moonlight, and yet stay her hand.

This is what Cassandra wonders: If it was pity that kept her alive, or machination, and if either had since reversed into the other. She wonders at the dappling of light through Greek leaves as it strikes her skin, and she wonders at the look Clytemnestra gives her sometimes when their gazes meet accidentally.

Cassandra knows what tenderness looks like, and desire; compassion and fear. She’s seen each in Helen’s eyes, fixed upon her so long ago, and so like her sister’s. Clytemnestra’s flicker with something more complex, terrible and wonderful to see. They’re hazel, she decides; lighter than her own, and strangely impassive.

This is Cassandra: A woman who has been taught love and known it by its absence. What she knows might save Clytemnestra’s life, might give clemency in return to the person who showed it to her first, and undeservedly. But Cassandra can’t bring her lips to let slip the words.

This is what Cassandra knows of Clytemnestra: That she is, beyond anything else, desolate. And so she spends hours at the queen’s side, learning her words.

There comes a day when Cassandra is brave enough to tell her: That Greek is the language spoken to her by Agamemnon and, in the back of her mind, Apollo. Clytemnestra relents immediately, and begins to learn Cassandra’s tongue instead. Now, Cassandra is the one who can speak alright. Now again she burns with guilt that she hasn’t told Clytemnestra.

...

The next day, she meets Orestes in the cottage in the forest. They walk side-by-side, not looking at one another, on paths barely traced into the underbrush. When he gets slightly ahead of her, she watches him, the confidence of his movement, his suntanned shoulders. She feels him do the same when it’s the reverse, and wonders what of her he sees.

“I don’t want to do it,” he admits after a long, long silence. “Truly.”

“Then why do you have to?”

“You _know_ ,” Orestes implores. “I don’t have any choice in the matter. It’s been dictated that I must, so I must.” Cassandra hums in reply. “You know the gods far better than I do,” he carries on. “Is there any other way?”

She shakes her head. “You can race fate a long ways, but it’ll overtake you. Always, in the end. The longer you run from it, the more devastating it is when it comes around. The most merciful thing to do is just to get it over and done with.”

“Merciful for whom? Her? Or me?”

“That depends on whose idea of mercy.” _Mercy,_ the act of sparing an innocent life. _Mercy_ , a dagger sliding into the chasm of Cassandra’s chest, coming out clean even of blood. _Mercy_ , the cut that never came.

The trees thin out, and their path becomes dappled like the floor of Clytemnestra’s bedroom, and Cassandra’s skin as she sits there. She walks over herself a ways, and they come out onto a jutting cliff, where yet the sea-spray reaches in tiny bursts.

“This is where my sister died,” says Orestes. “Not here, but somewhere like here. It might as well have been here. My father’s arms, my father’s kingdom—it’s all the same. I lost it all on a plain I’ve never seen. I hate my mother, but I don’t want to lose her too. I have to. It has to be my hands. You can see the future—is there nothing you can _do_?”

His voice breaks, and Cassandra reaches for his hand, an act of comfort, of steadying. This, she realizes, is the difference between mercy and compassion: What she tells Orestes is the worst thing in the world he’s ever heard.

“I can’t stop you. Your life is barreling on its course, and I can’t change that. I can only detour you, and it’ll hurt you more than before.”

She wipes his wet cheek. He says, “Put me through anything to put it off.”

Cassandra becomes Clytemnestra: The mercy kill eludes her. “Don’t ask me to do that.” The hand clutching her own is a hand so close to killing it’s stained already with blood she can see if she looks at it in periphery, but still she holds it.

“Can’t you tell her? If there’s nothing that can stop me trying, can’t she try to escape me?”

“Yes,” says Cassandra. It’s a lie, of course: Her truth is never believed.


	4. Chapter 4

_seven. misericord ii._

The next few days are a time of everything spiralling wildly earthward. She goes back to Orestes once, tries to do it again, but finds herself turning around at the halfway point and walking straight into the sea. Finds herself by Clytemnestra’s side several times a day, more than ever before, yet only ever really for a few minutes at a time before the itching under her skin grows unbearable and she has to leave, to run away, as if she’s trying to forestall something already locked inextricably into place.

Which is, after all, exactly what Cassandra is doing. She can feel the edge of a prophecy burning its way onto her tongue, the night-darkness threatening the corners of her vision at all times, but she won’t succumb to it: She knows that if she gives a prophecy to Clytemnestra now, it will never be believed. And some part of her hopes, still, that she’ll work up the nerve to tell her. Cassandra knows—better than anyone, she knows—that Clytemnestra will never, ever be able to escape what the gods have decreed for her. She knows that trying to delay that end will only increase the suffering wrought by it. But there is something, still, that makes her desperate to _try_. But she has long learned to tamp down her heart.

Cassandra had never loved Helen—not really. More than anything else, her face had reminded her of the anger that she carried. Her brother—Hektor, whom she loved, had loved her, she knew; loved her not like Alexander, not at all, but truer. Hektor, who had spoken to Cassandra, had loved Cassandra. There was a time, a few years into the war, before Cassandra had yet let go of her grief and guilt and fury, when the three of them had sat together in a darkened room, Cassandra lying with her head resting on her brother’s knee, and she had spoken to Helen for the first time. She had been—and she hates even to say it, charming; and charmed.

From then, Helen had come to her, in the evenings; and then in the night. Helen still couldn’t speak without slipping into Greek on words she couldn’t remember, a tongue that Cassandra had hated to learn, but between the two of them, they could converse, if shakily. She remembers the first time she had ever come to Paris’ room, and it was in his wife’s company. She had guided Cassandra to the looking-glass, held scarves to her hair and jewellry to her throat, whispered in her ear in the flickering candlelight. Cassandra stared at the two of them, in contrast: Her wan, her cheeks hollowed and her eyes shadowed, her lips dry. Helen dark, color high in her cheeks, thick hair spilling from her headscarf, hands strong and gentle. Ruby lips close to her skin; red and black and white.

Cassandra had never loved Helen—but Helen is the closest to it Cassandra’s ever come.

…

This is what it looks like with Clytemnestra: Nearly exactly the same, although Cassandra doesn’t let it go nearly as far. The tenderness she sees in the queen’s eyes frightens her, the same as her intensity in careless and unhallowed moments, in candlelight and flickering stars. There is once when they look in the mirror together; just the same. There is once, and it never happens again. For Cassandra’s seen Helen broken down, bare and gentle, her trembling hands on her husband’s sword, alone in their bed, imagining her blood upon it; again during the Fall, Agamemnon’s hands upon her and her blood running down from her forehead.

To love someone who lives is worse than loving someone who dies, she thinks idly. She can’t begin to imagine Helen back in Sparta, and she hates to imagine it. But to love someone who dies is terrible, too. So she doesn’t: She’s lived this long without it / it’s a mercy to herself.

…

There are only two ways for this story to end: One where Cassandra lives, and one where Cassandra dies. Her life is the only variable in the equation, the only thread still unspooling as the pattern weaves itself out. Everything, everything else lies fated so desperately as if to have already played out, a train Cassandra longs to stop with her body before it can screech to its stop.

It happens, as it must, and it happens before Cassandra’s steeled herself to tell Clytemnestra a thing about it. She sees the fear on the other woman’s face; the calm before her fury, before that too burns to a desperation loud, then quiet.

In the end, she begs for her life, suppliant, but Orestes does too, on his knees before thin air, tears running down his cheeks in a silent cry as the dagger’s held terribly in his grasp, and mother and son cry each other’s name as the knife plunges into her throat, until her name’s the only name left hanging in the damp air.

Orestes turns to Cassandra next, and they’re locked for an eternity into a silent glance. Cassandra voices first what each are thinking: “Kill me,” she begs, and he’s just like his mother.

He whispers her words _: that depends on whose idea of mercy_.

“Will you give me the mercy cut?” she asks again, and takes his unsteady hand. She brings her other hand to his blood-spattered cheek, trailing it across and streaking its stain like another kind of tear. “Will you?”

…

There are two ways for this story to end: Cassandra, for all her prescience, has never been able to see how her own life breaks.

She’s unsurprised, however, when Orestes walks out of the terrible palace alone.


End file.
